ANOKA, Minn. - An Anoka couple ran into trouble on vacation in Costa Rica after an all-terrain adventure landed one of them in the hospital.
"They're their pretty adventurous," said Sara Palmer. "They don't buy a lot of material things, but they do like to experience things."
But this latest experience for Elissa Merritt and her husband Ron may be more than what they bargained for.
Their family said the couple's vacation to Costa Rica filled with scuba diving and four-wheeling took a wrong turn.
Elissa told them a motorcyclist cut her off while she was on an ATV, she swerved, fell off a cliff and suffered a severe leg injury.
"They waited down there for two hours until the help came," described Palmer.
However, the arrival of help did not mean the end of the Merritt's saga. The family said the first hospital the couple were brought to was in a remote part of the country and had poor conditions. Elissa was moved to another hospital in San Jose, Costa Rica.
She needed surgery, which was expensive. The hospital demanded thousands of dollars, which the Merritt's paid with a credit card, but then they needed more money.
"It's like extortion down here basically," said Ron Merritt by phone on Tuesday. "They came in here and asked for $5,000, then the next day they asked for $10,000 and then yesterday they told us we had to give them $20,000 or we have to leave the hospital."
Typically, Americans are not insured internationally, but you can purchase travel medical insurance beforehand which, in the case of the Merritt's, would help now.
"A lot of the policies for travel medical insurance come with what is called emergency medical evacuation so what that will do is get you out of that country and get you back to your home country so that you can receive care that will be covered under your normal insurance policy," said AAA Travel's Matt Hehl.
Hehl said the cost depends on where you're going, your length of stay and your age, but roughly runs a couple hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, the family did figure out a way through friends and volunteers to fly Elissa and Ron Merritt back to the United States, ideally in time for a fundraiser this weekend to help cover the medical expenses.
(Copyright 2012 by KARE. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)